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KATY CLARK: I'm Katy Clark, and this is The World. Finance ministers from around the globe are in Washington today. These are officials representing a group of 20 nations, essentially the biggest economies in the world. Their host is Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. Geithner set the agenda for the gathering in a piece he offered for today's Financial Times. He wrote that “the G20 nations must follow through on their commitment to deliver the fiscal, monetary and financial policies necessary to restore growth. John Authers is the Investment Editor of the Financial Times in New York. John, G20 finance leaders are meeting today in Washington. What will investors want to hear from these leaders coming out of the meeting?

JOHN AUTHERS: I don't think investors are expecting an awful lot out of them beyond that they can at least continue to just get along. I think the chances of what Secretary Geithner really wants, which is coordinated agreement on a big fiscal re-stimulation packages along the lines of what we've seen here in the States. It's very obvious that's not going to happen, basically because the main countries in Europe aren't convinced that that was a good idea.

CLARK: Another thing that's on the agenda today is the $500 billion dollars that countries have pledged to the IMF. The European Union, Japan, and the US have all pledged $100 billion towards that total. What is the money for anyway?

AUTHERS: The risk at the moment is that the countries that could find themselves most exposed by the credit crunch as it moves through the system will be the emerging markets. Now, that's a particularly worrying scenario because the emerging markets have been leading the world in many ways. The recovery that we've seen in the stock market over the last couple of months now in many ways has been predicated on the belief that the emerging markets appear to be tidying through this. And so this is a proactive measure to try to stop that problem from happening. It's an unusual and pleasant departure from the script we've been following in the last year, in that it's actually an example of being proactive and dealing with the problem before it happens. We've been used to dealing with problems once they've already hit.

CLARK: Well, the economic news today out of Europe was particularly grim. Britain's economy shrank at its sharpest rate in 30 years. What do you think of when you hear that?

AUTHERS: Plainly, things are very alarming. The UK is just like the US only even more so. It's one of the few countries which actually had its own domestic housing bubble. It's even more dependent on financial services through the city of London than the American economy is. Against that, you do have to note that retail sales intriguingly actually increased this month. The British stock market, despite those very ugly GDP numbers was actually up today quite significantly.

CLARK: Well, John, it's a Friday, the end of another tough week in economic news. Is there anything you've seen that leads you to think that a recovery is anywhere in sight?

AUTHERS: Yes, actually. I wouldn't want to say it too loudly, but in terms of evidence that the really precipitous fall – the fall off the cliff, as Warren Buffet called it – that we saw after the great crisis that hit with the collapse of Lehman Brothers last September, it's obvious that the speed of that fall has slowed down quite significantly, that we are at least getting into something more like normal territory and the bottom is at least in sight. The huge question is exactly how long it will take us to clamber out of the hole. The other thing that intrigues me is although I have generally been very nervous about the prospects for China, there is gathering evidence that China does seem to be tiding its way through this crisis somehow. So there are some reasons for less than total pessimism on the horizon. I wouldn't want to speak about it too strongly, but we are at least not in the freefall period when anything seemed possible anymore.

CLARK: That's putting a positive spin on things. Thanks. John Authers is the Investment Editor of the Financial Times in New York. Nice to speak with you, John.

AUTHERS: Thank you.

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